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The Air Force Is Buying The Drones It Bans, Because DJI Cannot Be Faked
A missile security squadron says DJI's radio signatures and flight behavior cannot be reproduced by a rival airframe or a simulator. That is a fidelity admission with procurement consequences.
The Product Desk · Product desk
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What happened
- The U.S. Air Force is seeking to buy Chinese-made DJI drones for counter-drone training at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, home to part of America's Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile force.
- The procurement is being pursued by the 90th Missile Security Operations Squadron, which is responsible for security across the missile field and supports counter-small-unmanned-aircraft operations.
- According to procurement documents reported by Stars and Stripes, the service is seeking two refurbished DJI Mavic 2 Pro drones, two Mini 3 Pro drones and two Avata 2 systems, along with six payload-release devices and associated equipment.
- The Air Force's justification says DJI aircraft have proprietary radio-frequency signatures, communications protocols and flight characteristics that cannot simply be reproduced by another manufacturer's drone or a computer simulation.
- The Air Force's justification says DJI accounts for an estimated 80% to 85% of the global commercial drone market.
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Why it matters
The 90th Missile Security Operations Squadron is seeking to buy Chinese-made DJI drones to serve as training targets at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, which hosts part of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile force [s1c1][s1c2]. The reason given in the justification is the part worth reading twice: DJI's proprietary radio-frequency signatures, communications protocols and flight characteristics cannot simply be reproduced by another manufacturer's drone or by a computer simulation [s1c4].
The shopping list, per procurement documents reported by Stars and Stripes, is two refurbished Mavic 2 Pro, two Mini 3 Pro and two Avata 2 systems, plus six payload-release devices and associated equipment [s1c3]. That is six airframes across three product lines and one release device per airframe [s1d1]. The unit's rationale for picking the market leader is scale: the Air Force estimates DJI holds 80% to 85% of the global commercial drone market [s1c5].
Strip away the awkwardness and what is left is a statement about training fidelity. Counter-drone crews are being taught to detect and defeat a signal, and the service is saying on the record that the signal is a property of the hardware, not of a spec sheet that a substitute vendor or a simulator can approximate [s1c4]. Every detection library, jammer profile and operator judgement built at F.E. Warren is therefore calibrated against equipment the Pentagon has designated a Chinese military company, a designation renewed for Shenzhen DJI Technology Co. Ltd. in a June 2026 Federal Register notice [s1c9][s1c11]. DJI is still contesting it; in August a U.S. appeals court ordered a lower court to reconsider part of the case concerning the basis for the designation [s1c10].
The policy is not being broken so much as split. A July 2025 Pentagon memorandum, "Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance," pushed a preference for domestically manufactured drones while also directing the military to train against modern drone threats [s1c7]. The procurement documents lean on the second half of that instruction, citing authority to acquire limited quantities of foreign-made drone equipment for electronic-warfare testing, training and counter-drone development [s1c8]. The mitigation is technical rather than legal: the aircraft are to be loaded with RIZER software in an air-gapped configuration intended to prevent data moving to foreign entities or to sensitive U.S. military networks [s1c6]. Note what that concedes. The threat model is the radio link and the flight profile, and the drone is being treated as a physical target stripped of its network.
The demand signal behind this is not hypothetical. A 2025 Air Force research program counted 350 reported drone incursions over more than 100 U.S. military installations during 2024 [s1c12], which averages close to one reported incursion per day nationally and fewer than four per installation for the year [s1d2].
Three things to watch. Whether this justification language gets copied, because "cannot be reproduced by another manufacturer's drone or a computer simulation" is now a template any unit can cite [s1c4]. Whether a domestic airframe or a simulator vendor produces a fidelity claim that survives the same test, which is the only path to closing this loop. And whether the litigation over DJI's designation moves, since the training pipeline and the ban list currently point at the same serial numbers [s1c10][s1c11].